stantly in a state of corrosion, wearing apparel is completely saturated, and articles of wool or leather are covered with mould in the course of a night.' Here then, according to all medical theory, we might expect to find the very focus of most malignant fever; yet hither invalids from other stations are sent for recovery; and in consequence of the favourable result of some previous experiments, the Commander-in-Chief, in November, 1836, gave instructions to the Medical Board at Madras, for the establishment of a sanatorium either at Moelmyne or at Amherst, about nine miles distant, at the entrance of the same river. And well might confidence be placed in the salubrity of a station where during the last four years of the Report (1833-1837), the deaths from fever have been fewer than would have occurred among an equal number of troops in England' (Report, p. 8). Many more examples of similar import might be adduced. The supereminence of the Baconian or Inductive philosophy was never so practically exhibited as in our Parliamentary Reports and other official documents (such as those at the head of this article), furnishing on the respective subjects accumulations of facts by which all practical reasoners are bound to dress their arguments, and all philosophers to readjust their theories. And thus it has been, that from the ascertainment of the ages of the existing population, of the number of births and deaths in a given population, and of the ages at which the deaths occurred, as furnished by our censuses and registers, all Europe has been enabled to rectify their calculations on the value of life in each sex (now found to be materially different), and at every step of age.* The result has been a general reduction in the cost of life-insurance, and a consequent augmented reward and additional motive to individual prudence, and to affectionate self-denial. And no doubt the cloud of witnesses (though it be not easy to tell why they are called a cloud whose purpose it is to elucidate), produced in the volumes of the present Census, will be carefully examined, and astutely cross-questioned, by the learned counsel of the parties interested. In another scientific department, that of medical science, the Reports of the Registrar-General have furnished the most important data, of which Mr. Farr (in his letters to the Registrar * That the general reader may have some idea of the difference made in these calculations, we may state, that of 1,000,000 persons twenty-five years of age, there would live till sixty-five-34,286 according to Dr. Price's Northampton Tables; and, according to Mr. Finlaison's (in 1827), 53,950. An annuity to one now twenty-five, to commence at sixty-five, would be, according to Price, 11s.; according to Finlaison, 19s.; and Price, besides, calculated the value of male and female life without discrimination. constituting constituting the several appendices) has given an elaborate analysis, accompanied by much curious and valuable observation; and a like service has been rendered for Ireland in the memoir by Surgeon Wilde; all which, combined with the information supplied by the 'Occupation Abstract,' would form a body of medical statistics unparalleled in the history of the science. And for the use of such materials the greatest facilities are afforded by the joint instructions of the respective Presidents of the Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons, and Society of Apothecaries (4th Report, p. 91): by observance of which, precision and uniformity in the language of nosology will be obtained, and consequent accuracy of information from medical reports. But these are subjects too extensive and peculiar for discussion here; and we must content ourselves with noticing some particulars of more general character. One of the most important is the inquiry concerning the increase or decrease of imprudent marriages, as essentially influencing physical comfort and moral respectability. The best measure for estimating these is the proportion of persons contracting marriage under twenty-one years of age and the result for the whole of England exhibits but little improvement. The persons married under age in the three years ending June 30, 1841, were 9.23 per cent. of the whole number married; the men under age were only about 1-19th of the men of full age; the women under age were a sixth of the women of full age (Registrar-General, 4th Report, p. 7). But it is satisfactory to observe that the prudential check operates with most control where from previous general opinion it would have been least expected; and where assuredly the want of it would produce the most baneful effects. We have taken the distinctively agricultural counties (specified in a foregoing note), and find the average proportion of persons married under twenty-one years of age in the three years ending 30th of June, 1841, to be 14 per cent. of all the persons married; whilst in the distinctively manufacturing districts (with nearly the same population) it is only 12 per cent. This is another example of the fallibility of popular opinion: that is, of opinion widely diffused, whether among the great vulgar or the small.' And the like is observable in the mining districts. We take the three counties of Cornwall, Durham, and Stafford, with a population (2,270,590) sufficiently large to sanction general inference; and we find the average proportion of precocious marriages only 9.97, little more than the average of the whole kingdom (9.23); though in this occupation the temptation to early marriage is great, because the male children, at least, least, so early find their hands and labour too,' and so early become independent labourers : Hinc est ergo cibus magni quoque juvenis, et se Pascentis, propriâ cum jam facit arbore nidos. The numerical importance of the mining population is perhaps little understood. In Cornwall and Staffordshire they nearly equal the agricultural; the respective numbers being for Cornwall, 25,275 and 26,120; for Staffordshire, 19,735 and 26,120: but in Durham the agriculturists are only 13,382, and the miners 17,994. We expect to have but few female readers of our present article, and of such as get to the end of it, vel duo, vel nemo: but as we have been making much mention of the value of such disquisitions in correcting vulgar prejudices, we shall conclude by noticing how contradicted by fact is that of imputing to females especially an undue anxiety to conceal their age. For in the Report of the Ages of Persons in Great Britain' (p. 475), it is stated, that of persons whose ages had not been specified, the females were 13,794, and the males were 132,481. For the progress of the various and important information furnished by such documents as we have been considering, the best wish we can form is that the talent and assiduity of the same Commissioners may be devoted to the statistical history of our current decade. ART. III.-1. Ueber das Grabmal des Alyattes (On the tomb of Alyattes). Essay read in the Royal Academy of Munich by Professor Fred. Thiersch, 3rd August, 1833. 2. Etruria Celtica. By Sir William Betham, Ulster King of Arms, &c. Dublin, 2 vols. 1842. 3. The History of Etruria. By Mrs. Hamilton Gray. Parts I. and II. 8vo. London, 1843-1844. OF F all the races, Pelasgians, Oscans, Umbrians, Siculi, &c., partly of kindred stock, in part, no doubt, radically distinct, among whom Italy was from a remote period divided, the Etruscans have in all ages been the especial object of curiosity; as well on account of the mysterious singularity of their character, language, and manners, as in consideration of the ascendancy they once enjoyed over the whole peninsula; still more perhaps from their acknowledged influence in developing the power of their Roman disciples and conquerors.* * Several points which will here fall under consideration were examined in this Journal at some length nearly ten years ago (Q. R., vol. liv. p. 429 seq.); and we shall assume that the reader has that article at hand for reference. A preliminary A preliminary point, in all such inquiries of some, but here of more than usual moment, is a right understanding as to the name or names by which the race whom they concern are designated by our classical authorities. That by which they called themselves, we are informed on respectable, though not conclusive, testimony, was Rasena. Their proper name among the Greeks was Tyrrhenian, or Tyrsenian. This title, however, also extended in its wider application to the whole inhabitants of central Italy (hence called Tyrrhenia); especially to that portion of them more commonly known as Pelasgians-hence frequently styled Tyrrhenian Pelasgians. The circumstance, however, of the former term being confined, in its more specific sense, to the Etruscans, and of their ascendancy in the Peninsula at the period when the Greeks first became acquainted with its interior, affords at least plausible ground for the inference that they were the original Tyrrhenians, and that the other races, for the most part their subjects or tributaries, had it but in a secondary sense; just as the inhabitants of Britain now all bear with foreigners the collective name of English. Such, accordingly, was the unanimous view of the subject among the ancients. It has, however, as we shall see in the sequel, been called in question by influential modern inquirers. No similar ambiguity attaches to the term Etruscan, or its equivalent, Tuscan, their proper distinctive title among the Romans, and which—as adopted in familiar use by ourselves will deserve a preference throughout these observations. Herodotus derives the name Tyrrhenian from Tyrrhenus, son of Atys, King of Lydia, chief of a colony who, driven by famine at home to seek a new habitation, landed at a remote period on the Italian shore, and spread their conquests into the interior. This tradition seems to have been unanimously acquiesced in up to the age of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who rejects it on the negative authority of Xanthus, a Lydian historian, or rather a Greek historian, settled in Lydia, contemporary with or shortly prior to Herodotus. This author, he asserts, neither mentions a Tyrrhenus in his list of the royal line of Lydia, nor a Lydian colony planted in Italy, although particularizing various other colonies of less importance. According to him, Atys had but two sons, Lydus and Torrhebus, both of whom, remaining at home, gave their names to the two principal and still subsisting subdivisions of the Lydian or Mæonian nation. In favour of this view Dionysius further urges the dissimilarity between the language and manners of the Lydians and Etruscans, and pronounces the latter to be aborigines, or children of the Italian soil. His scepticism, however, seems to have had no weight whatever with the classical public, either Greek or native. Not only does the Lydian tradition continue to be asserted or admitted in the most authoritative quarters, even by the Lydians and Etruscans themselves, at every subsequent period of antiquity, but no further allusion occurs to any difference of opinion on the subject. In the schools of modern Europe the antiquities of Etruria, up to a comparatively recent period, formed but a subordinate chapter of Greek or Roman archæology. The few works devoted to their separate treatment were not at least of a character to attract interest to the subject. This is certainly somewhat surprising, considering the high place which antiquarian study at large then held in the scale of literary pursuit, the zeal of the Italian literati for those branches of it which more nearly concerned their native country, and the real curiosity of this one in particular-especially since the discovery on the soil of Etruria of numerous inscriptions in an unknown dialect, and in a character closely resembling the old Græco-Phoenician, of which at that time few or no genuine specimens were extant; and thus offering a twofold inducement to those abstruse philological speculations then so much in vogue. * 6 The first who attempted to rouse the public, native or foreign, from their apathy, was Thomas Dempster, a once famous jurist and polyhistor, whose powers of imagination were largely shown in his histories, though his really wonderful memory procured for him in an erudite age the flattering title of the Bibliotheca Loquens;' and it is certainly a remarkable coincidence, that while a learned Scottish gentleman (for such he claimed to be, by birth as well as education) should have been the first to awaken a taste for Etruscan antiquity among professional scholars, a learned Scottish lady should have taken a similar precedence in dressing it up in such a form as to render it palatable to ordinary readers.† A century elapsed, however, before Dempster's labours began to influence the world. Having, as a Roman Catholic, sought a more favourable field for the exercise of his talents abroad, he filled during some of the latter years of his life the chair of civil law at Pisa; and it was as a tribute of gratitude and respect to his patron, Duke Cosmo II., that he composed his great work the 'Etruria Regalis,' a series of elaborate disquisitions on the his *This extraordinary man was far less celebrated in his own age for his varied and extensive talents and learning, than for the wild eccentricity of his character and general conduct, of which some curious notices may be seen in Bayle's Dictionary. For his statement of his parentage see the article on the Dempsters of Muresk, in "Collections on the Shires of Aberdeen,' &c., printed for the Spalding Club, p. 463. Among other marvels he states that he was the twenty-fourth child of his parents, and that their union was blessed with five children after him. See Mrs. Gray's earlier work, 'The Sepulchres of Etruria,' noticed in Quart. Rev. vol. lxvii. p. 375. tory, |